ideas reading thought fodder time

Jill-ohnny Come Lately

Just call me “Jill-ohnny Come Lately.” I finally got around to reading Kevin Kwan’s “Crazy Rich Asians” and I loved it. The copyright date is 2013 and it’s been made into “A Major Motion Picture,” as my second-hand, thrift store copy announces from the cover. It takes time to make major motion pictures, and while I’ve heard of the movie, I haven’t yet seen it. I wonder if I will like it as much as…

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design history ideas pragmatic historian time

A Thought Experiment on Flag Day

Today is Flag Day in the United States. I thought it was Father’s Day, but that’s next weekend. My days are all messed up with working from home because they just run into one another. I can see why holidays are so important for marking time. I don’t typically pay much attention to Flag Day, but as circumstance would have it, I was thinking about the U.S. flag a couple of days ago. Here was…

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history pragmatic historian time

Do Your Civic Duty – Fill Out the 2020 Census

In July 2019, which feels so veeeeery long ago now, I discussed the importance of the census, how getting an accurate count of everyone who lives in the United States is important for the distribution of government funding, figuring out how many representatives states have in Congress, and for future historians wanting data about who was living where and with whom. Guess what? It’s census time RIGHT NOW! April 1, 2020 is Census Day. It…

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history pragmatic historian time

Career Planning in the 1980s

Welcome to my childhood trunk. Inside of this ragged trunk, I stored papers, letters, and other mementos gathered from middle school through college. The trunk when new was covered by white wicker and was given to me by my Grandma Florence. As you can see from the photo, most of the wicker on the lower portion of the trunk is gone, revealing particle board. Thank our various cats for that. They enjoyed scratching the corners,…

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history pragmatic historian time

The Importance of the Year – or Decade – in Review

I am writing this post on New Year’s Day 2020. My Twitter feed is afire with people sharing their reviews of the past year or decade. The decade review is especially popular because we just flipped to 2020, which many feel is the beginning of a new decade while others argue that it is the last year of the decade and the new decade won’t actually start until 2021. Yet others point out that time…

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